they could park the cars on the driving range
ORIGINAL: hugger-4641
ORIGINAL: Sport_Pilot
Golf balls are dimpled simply to keep them from rolling off gently sloped greens. However they do make the ball travel further. But because of increased lift not reduced drag. The mythbustes increased milage may be due to an error in measurment, differance in engines (better ring seal, or larger or smaller bearing clearances, etc), or dumb luck that the dimples were placed at just the right spot to gain some decreased drag from vortex which caused stagnet air near high drag areas. However with a decrease of 12% I suspect its a measurment error.
LMAO at that one! In that case I need some golf balls with bigger dimples! I have to nit pick with you about the lift though. A round ball would create ''lift'' if the ball is spinning in the right direction, mine usually create lift on the right side (otherwise called a slice!) but the effect on distance is due to reduced drag, not lift. As far as cars with dimpled surfaces, you won't see it until auto mfgs are forced to do it or they figure out a cost effective way to mfg a textured surface car body. I'm not sure even a 12% increase would offset the r&d,tooling,equipment, costs etc. that would be involved. Even if the Mythbuster's measurements are accurate, the conditions are not all inclusive. They're test conditions were probably about as ideal as could be. Different vehicle, driving conditions, etc. would still create a wide range of actual results.